I don’t know about all of you but it was nice to get some seat time again…

I was talking to Bob Roark about a week ago and he was saying that it’s been a long stretch since our last race. “I think I’ve got some withdrawals going on here. I need to get back out and dodge some cones again soon” I know what you mean Bob; I was going through the same thing myself.

What a night huh? Although things got started about 45 minutes late we still got 9 runs in and even finished a just a tad ahead of schedule.  

They told me to build a course something around 35 seconds average. After looking at the RAW times…the majority of you were in the 37 to 40 second range…I missed the goal by that much…SORRY, but it’s tough to design something that short and keep it FUN. I’ll try harder next time. By the way I have to send a shout out to all those that helped me gather cones and build all the walls. Even with the Golf Cart I couldn’t have done it without you. On top of that it was hot as can be out there (The asphalt had to be near 135 degrees) and I didn’t hear a single complaint. Everyone worked well together and showed awesome TEAM spirit. So I send you all a coveted “ATTA-BOY”.

Anyway getting back to the course…it threw a couple of different aspects at most of you. The intent was to create parity and bunch everyone’s times up and be semi-fair to all cars. Directly off the starting line you had a couple of quick kinks (BTW they were both less than 90 degrees)…a little different from the drag race style starts you’re most accustomed to. Followed by a two cone slalom and a slightly decreasing right turn around the light pole (if you hadn’t notice it started out with a 27 ft radius and finished with a 25ft radius) followed by the semi-sweeper to the left. (You had to be patient and let the car set after the slight drop before hammering the gas here.) The course took you around the two nasty patches into a gate and another semi-sweeper into a couple of gates forming a reversing semi-straight stretch into a slight unweighting drop off into the banked right then left around a quick speed checking cone into the finish…

Here’s an interesting trivia calculation for you… If you multiply 83 cars times 9 runs you get 747 passes…HOWEVER, we lost a few cars after the first set of runs. So let’s say there were only 73 cars that came back for the second set of runs… (83 X 4) + (73 X 5) = 697 passes. Now let’s take 697 passes divided by 5.5 hours and that equals 126.75 passes per hour or 2.11 passes per minute. Then if you take into account how we stagger starts and use 697 passes as the baseline. Bottom line that is one pass every 28.4 seconds. Now that is a pretty amazing STAT considering that it doesn’t even take into account switching out different run groups and the couple of brief delays along the way…

Maybe that will give you an idea of why the starting line and grid people are so intent on getting you to move up and to the starting line in a quick and timely manner. I know it’s fun to joke, rib and just have fun with other drivers but let’s stay focused so we can keep things flowing…

I hear that DJ is going to try and get us 10 runs on the 14^th event…SO keep this in mind when you’re in grid. Please stay close and ready at your car.

DJ is also going to try something we’ve been kicking around for a while. The plan is we’re going to take 5 runs in one direction on the course and then our second runs we’ll all drive the reverse direction…I can’t wait to see this play out…I expect it will be FUN…

Anyway, back to the racing… In the heat of the day cars were fighting for that coveted traction factor as the asphalt was “HOTTT” and on the greasy side. When the sun started dropping the times started dropping. There were two other drivers close to me and we were all trying to get down to our goal time. We all three made our goal but not until the sun went down and the track cooled.

See you all on the 14^th…

Robert

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